300 dials a day, zero qualified conversations. here's what was actually wrong

Investor · Nationwide · Member since 2024 · 125 posts · 19 votes

2mo

Aly, this is spot on.

The part that gets overlooked is that “list quality” is not just the list type. Two absentee owner lists can perform completely differently depending on freshness, owner/contact accuracy, phone quality, and where the seller actually is in the decision process.

I’ve seen the same issue where people try to fix a bad campaign by changing the script, changing the VA, or increasing dial volume, when the real problem is that the caller is working records that should have been filtered or reprioritized before they ever hit the dialer.

Fresh data matters, but I also think the next layer is prioritization.

Not every skip-traced record deserves the same caller time. Some records are clean enough to call first. Some need research. Some may still be interesting properties but weak outreach targets because the owner match or phone path is poor.

That’s where contactability, owner/contact confidence, motivation timing, and call-first priority become really important.

A raw list is not a call plan. The better the list is organized before outreach starts, the less time the team wastes trying to force conversations out of bad records.

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Aly Mahfouz
OP
United States · Member since 2026 · 11 posts · 5 votes
2mo
Quote from @Chris Arnold:

@Aly Mahfouz

Aly, this is spot on.

The part that gets overlooked is that “list quality” is not just the list type. Two absentee owner lists can perform completely differently depending on freshness, owner/contact accuracy, phone quality, and where the seller actually is in the decision process.

I've seen the same issue where people try to fix a bad campaign by changing the script, changing the VA, or increasing dial volume, when the real problem is that the caller is working records that should have been filtered or reprioritized before they ever hit the dialer.

Fresh data matters, but I also think the next layer is prioritization.

Not every skip-traced record deserves the same caller time. Some records are clean enough to call first. Some need research. Some may still be interesting properties but weak outreach targets because the owner match or phone path is poor.

That’s where contactability, owner/contact confidence, motivation timing, and call-first priority become really important.

A raw list is not a call plan. The better the list is organized before outreach starts, the less time the team wastes trying to force conversations out of bad records.
the prioritization piece is what gets skipped entirely and then everyone blames the caller or the script.
from the calling side you feel it in the session data. a caller running 300 dials on a raw unsorted list is doing completely different work than someone running 150 on a tiered list where the first batch is fresh skip traces with confirmed owner matches and clean phone paths. same script, same hours, completely different output.
the thing nobody talks about is what bad list organization does to a caller over the course of a session. you burn through 40 disconnected lines, wrong numbers, and people who sold the property 18 months ago and your energy going into the next live answer is different. that's not a training problem. that's the list.
we started separating records by data confidence before anything hits the dialer. the difference in qualified conversations between the top tier and the bottom tier was large enough that it changed how we sequence work across a whole session. you stop spending your best calling hours trying to force conversations out of records that were never going to go anywhere.
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Chris Arnold
Investor · Nationwide · Member since 2024 · 125 posts · 19 votes
2mo
@Aly Mahfouz

Aly, exactly. “Data confidence before dialer” is the right way to think about it.

A lot of teams treat the caller as the first filter, when the list should already be filtered and tiered before the session starts. If the caller’s best energy is spent fighting disconnected numbers, wrong contacts, stale owners, and unclear ownership paths, the campaign is already operating at a disadvantage.

That’s actually the exact problem I’ve been building around — taking raw skip trace output and turning it into a more outreach-ready call plan before it ever hits the dialer.

The goal is to separate records by things like owner/contact confidence, phone quality, contactability, motivation timing, and call-first priority so the caller is not working one flat file where every record gets treated the same.

Same caller, same script, same time block — but a much cleaner starting point.
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Erik EstradaBusiness Member

Lender · Member since 2022 · 6k+ posts · 1k+ votes

2mo

Quote from @Aly Mahfouz:

everyone talks about dial volume. 200 a day, power dialer, stack your lists.

i've run campaigns doing 300 dials a day that came back with zero qualified conversations. i've also run campaigns doing 80 dials that booked 5-6 serious seller calls that same week. wasn't the dialer. wasn't the script. it was the list.

what most investors do, and honestly most VAs too, is grab whatever list they can find. probate, absentee, pre-foreclosure, vacant, doesn't matter. dump it in the dialer and go. the data is six months old, half the numbers are disconnected, and a good chunk of those "motivated sellers" made their decision over a year ago and either sold or stopped caring.

the contact rate doesn't lie. if you're burning 100 dials to get 3 live conversations, something is wrong with the list. a clean, recently skip-traced list gets you 8-12 conversations per 100 dials. if you're under 5, the data is stale.

two things that move the needle more than anything: pull fresh data (skip-traced within 30-60 days, not recycled county records) and sort by where people are in the process, not just list type. pre-foreclosure with a court date 90 days out is a completely different call than someone who just got a notice of default filed. same category, totally different urgency.

anyway. if your contact rate is bad, i'd look at the list before i touched the script.

This is very true. Data is so important and critical to succeeding in RE.

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Aly Mahfouz
OP
United States · Member since 2026 · 11 posts · 5 votes
2mo
Quote from @Erik Estrada:

Quote from @Aly Mahfouz:

everyone talks about dial volume. 200 a day, power dialer, stack your lists.

i've run campaigns doing 300 dials a day that came back with zero qualified conversations. i've also run campaigns doing 80 dials that booked 5-6 serious seller calls that same week. wasn't the dialer. wasn't the script. it was the list.

what most investors do, and honestly most VAs too, is grab whatever list they can find. probate, absentee, pre-foreclosure, vacant, doesn't matter. dump it in the dialer and go. the data is six months old, half the numbers are disconnected, and a good chunk of those "motivated sellers" made their decision over a year ago and either sold or stopped caring.

the contact rate doesn't lie. if you're burning 100 dials to get 3 live conversations, something is wrong with the list. a clean, recently skip-traced list gets you 8-12 conversations per 100 dials. if you're under 5, the data is stale.

two things that move the needle more than anything: pull fresh data (skip-traced within 30-60 days, not recycled county records) and sort by where people are in the process, not just list type. pre-foreclosure with a court date 90 days out is a completely different call than someone who just got a notice of default filed. same category, totally different urgency.

anyway. if your contact rate is bad, i'd look at the list before i touched the script.

This is very true. Data is so important and critical to succeeding in RE.
yeah and the expensive part is that data problems almost always get blamed on something else first. the script, the caller, the market. usually by the time someone actually looks at the list quality the campaign has already burned through a few hundred dials on records that were never going to convert.
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Igor Ganapolsky

Englewood, NJ · Member since 2018 · 258 posts · 36 votes

1w

@Aly Mahfouz @Chris Arnold — this thread nails the real problem, and I want to push the "data confidence before dialer" concept one step further because I think there's a $0 version of what Chris is building.

Aly's contact rate benchmark is the key diagnostic: under 5 contacts per 100 dials means stale data. That's not a caller problem, not a script problem, not a dialer problem. The list was dead before the session started.

But here's where I'd challenge the fix. Aly says pull fresh skip-traced data (30-60 days). Chris says tier by data confidence before the dialer hits. Both are right — but both still assume you're starting with a generic list type (probate, absentee, pre-foreclosure) and then paying to make it callable.

What if you never start with a generic list?

I source deals from county tax deed auctions, and the sourcing process itself IS the data confidence filter. Before I dial a single number, I cross-reference three county data sources on the same property:

1. Tax Collector — tax delinquent (owner is behind on property taxes)
2. Code Enforcement — active violations (property is deteriorating, owner is non-responsive)
3. Clerk of Court — probate or lis pendens filed (legal pressure, timeline, deadline)

When all three converge on the same address, motivation isn't a guess from a list type — it's documented in three independent government records. That's not "data confidence tiering." That's data confidence verification.

Here's why this solves the exact problems Aly described:

"Half the numbers are disconnected" — county records are updated by government clerks processing real filings. The owner name and mailing address on a tax deed list are current because the county just sent the tax notice. You're not working recycled data from 18 months ago.

"40 disconnected lines burns caller energy" — you're not skip-tracing a generic list and hoping for the best. You already know the property exists, you know the owner from tax records, and you know they have three separate government problems converging on their address. The call isn't cold — you're calling with context from public records.

"Data problems get blamed on something else first" — exactly. The script, the VA, the market, the dialer. But the real fix isn't better skip traces on a bad list. It's starting with a list where motivation is confirmed before you spend a dollar on contact info.

Chris is building the right framework — turning raw skip trace output into outreach-ready call plans. I'd argue the convergence approach skips the skip trace problem entirely. You don't need to tier records by data confidence when every record on your list already has three government sources confirming the same thing.

The cost comparison matters too. A typical skip trace costs $0.10-$0.25 per record. If you're working a list of 1,000 names and half are unskip-traceable, you just spent $50-$125 on records that never convert. County tax collector websites, code enforcement databases, and clerk of court records? Free. Every county publishes them. You just have to cross-reference manually.

For anyone running the 300-dials-a-day campaign and getting zero qualified conversations: before you pay for another skip trace, try pulling your county's tax delinquent list, cross-referencing it against code enforcement violations, and layering in probate/lis pendens from the clerk. Where all three overlap on the same property — that's your call list. Every number on it has documented, multi-source, government-verified motivation.

That's not a better list. That's a fundamentally different way of building the list.

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300 dials a day, zero qualified conversations. here's what was actually wrong

6 Replies